Silhouette UK: Using Basic Shapes to Make a Background

Friday, 7 July 2017

Using Basic Shapes to Make a Background

Hi there, Niki back with you today, and I am making a custom background using just a few basic shapes.

I began by choosing some files that were already in my library and opened them up. I went for a star, a heart, a scribbled circle and an arrow.

I released the compound path of the scribble circle and copied the middle circle. I then put it back and converted it back to path. This is a crucial step, if a shape is only grouped rather than has a compound path then it may not weld properly. I then arranged my scribble circle as well as some of the middle circles onto my mat, and re-sized some so I had a variety of sizes.

As you can see, I really went for it!!

With all the circles in place I selected them all and clicked on the weld icon.

With my background all welded together, I then added in the other basic shapes. I have placed them inside the solid circles.

With all my shapes in place, I then drew a box around my entire mat, went to the Modify menu and clicked Crop.

The effect of the Crop function is that it turns those pesky bits that were hanging off the edges into a cut line so that my design will cut as one piece.

I then set about back-fillig all those shapes and scribble circles with pretty papers and placed the finished design on a lightly coloured background paper. This allowed the white cut file to show and all the pretty colours pop.